JUNE 15, 1998:
The Truman Show is, indeed, a more interesting entertainment than
a number of films released thus far in 1998. It is not, contrary
to its marketing hype, a defining moment in cinema history or
some profound socio-historical revelation for the millennium.
The central conceit of Andrew Niccols screenplay  that a man
has, since birth, lived as the unwitting star of a 24-hours-a-day
world-broadcast television show  is original and fraught with
potential for examining the impacts of television in our lives,
our art, and our society.

For its central dramatic (and, purportedly, its philosophical)
conflict, 30-year-old Truman begins to rebel as he pieces together
the nearly incomprehensible reality of a life which has been lived
in a huge, domed set resembling a picture-perfect small town and
in which all of the picture-perfect citizens, including his wife
and family and everyone hes ever known, are actors. Unsatisfied
with this safe but controlled existence, he decides to overcome
his fear of the unknown and break out. Although The Truman Show
is likely to be a huge commercial success, some viewers may come
away without the final, cathartic sense of release the films
protagonist achieves. For, ultimately, the film plays it safe;
it never launches itself from its clever premise. It seems almost
hermetically smug in its assurance that it has a couple of brilliant
ideas and a few remarkable images.

Peter Weir, a seductively imaginative director, provides some
compensatory resonance for Niccols script, but cannot rescue
it, in the end, from the cerebral anemia that keeps it from being
as thought-provoking as one wants it to be. Like the artificial
life in Trumans hometown of Seahaven, the risk-taking of this
film is, ironically and annoyingly, stifled; just as Truman has
been programmed not to trust himself in the outside world, so
we, the audience for The Truman Show, have not been trusted enough
by its makers to want to think further. In much of its pre-release
marketing ballyhoo and in numerous interviews, the writer and
director have touted the fact that they are proud of having managed
to wrangle out of Hollywood the first big-budget art film.
What they seem to have wrangled is a product that cheats both
halves of its promised hybrid persona. The tone of the film is
wildly uneven and the pace, at times, deadly. One can appreciate
the goal and the effort  and enjoy much of this film  without
being inspired to join lemming-like queues buying Truman dolls
or the cocktail party psycho-babble comparing the film with Sartre
or Kierkegaard. (A far stronger argument might be made for the
integrity of vision and the imaginative realization of the heros
quest theme in Tim Burtons superb Pee Wees Big Adventure.)

Noah Emmerich and Jim Carrey in The Truman Show.

The usefulness of The Truman Show in discussions of media and
culture is that it affords a painless point of departure. However
much Jim Carrey may be banking on this film to expand his castability
for dramatic roles, everyone going to see The Truman Show can
guess theyre unlikely to be brought to their knees in tears.
Theyre correct: the kinetically clownish Carrey comports himself
well enough here, but neither he nor the script has enough edge
really to drive the hard issues home, to nettle us with questions
about how we respond to, and are defined by, the visual media.
The films air of cartoonishness, of fantasy, is heightened by
our already-established perception of Carreys persona, and were
offered little reason to alter it. He uses just enough of his
standard repertoire of funny faces and bits to sabotage his leap
to acceptance as a serious actor. When, in a scene or two, he
expresses angst or even cries a bit, it merely seems one more
Carreyesque look-at-this! stunt, no more genuinely felt than
the acted emotions of the people around him. The fundamental
tension of the film  that Truman discovers the truth of his life
and wants to step outside the frame of the cameras control 
is not reinforced by the casting of such a shamelessly (by his
own admission) camera-hungry star. Additionally, the film was
shot in the tidily upscale, architecturally homogeneous, community
of Seaside on the Florida Gulf. Both actor and ambience keep the
film, and us, from getting  depending on your point of view 
either too serious or serious enough. (The attempt at eerie big-brotherliness
here doesnt hold a candle to that 50s paranoia classic, Invasion
of the Body Snatchers.)

Even if it is substantially a what-might-have-been proposition,
The Truman Show may be one more popular encouragement to continue
our conversation about the radically shifting lines between art
and life, medium and message, ordering influence and random reality,
reportage and passivity, human consciousness and virtual existence.

The final scene is brilliant  almost teleological  and memorable,
far more effective thematically than much of the wan, sophomoric
philosophizing for which most of the film settles. It is the occasional
moment like this that makes one realize that The Truman Show is
afflicted with the very outrage that plagues its hero  its trapped
by an exhilarating concept that atrophies through underdevelopment;
it doesnt let our minds or our souls breathe. Like the small,
circumscribed, calculated, regimen of Seahaven  The Truman Show
is just good enough to make you angry that it isnt a lot better.

A Perfect Murder, a well-made, stylish thriller starring Michael
Douglas, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Viggo Mortensen, suggests that the
battle is already over and that we are passing irredeemably into
the 21st century as soulless, immoral creatures motivated sheerly
by greed, lust, and a need to decorate the howling void of our
pathetic existence with pretty objects.

Michael Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow in A Perfect Murder.

Andrew Davis directs from a screenplay by Patrick Smith Kelly,
who has done a marvelous job of updating the old Frederick Knott
play Dial M for Murder, which Hitchcock brought to the screen
in 1953 with Ray Milland, Grace Kelly, and Robert Cummings. Kellys
cleverly machinated script segues significantly, and to heightened
effect, from the original, and Davis knows exactly what hes doing
with the perfectly cast actors, the atmospheric Manhattan settings,
and a permeating sense of contrast between overripe, luxurious
appearances, and icy, inhumane realities.

Paltrow plays the much-younger wife of a gonzo broker whose sense
of ownership defines him. They have great art and the most drop-dead
gorgeous Central Park apartment in recent film history. She is
his primary treasure: Aside from being a svelte blonde who works
as a translator at the U.N. when shes not lunching at LEtoile,
she has a $100 million trust fund and no pre-nup agreement. She
is also having an affair with a downtown artist her own age. As
her husbands business schemes begin to tank, his acquisitiveness
takes a deadlier turn.

To describe any more of the plot would break the cardinal rule
of film reviewing. Suffice to say that Paltrow and Mortensen are
well-cast, the twists are engrossing, the cinematography sensual,
the art direction handsome.

The richest treat in this gilded cage of forbidden pleasures is
Michael Douglas in his strongest, most richly detailed performance
in years. As the well-tailored Machiavelli, he makes cold charm
irresistible. He exudes shrewdness, power, and an elegantly managed
need to control. Hes regally, impeccably, loathsome.